Serbs favor pro-EU path in early election results

Serbia’s pro-European ruling party appeared headed for a crushing victory in Sunday’s parliamentary elections, as early returns gave the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić more than half the vote.

With 65 percent of votes counted, the SNS was on 51 percent, according to the Centre for Free Elections and Democracy (CeSID) — that’s more than the 48 percent the party won in the last elections in 2014.

Three other groupings also looked certain to enter parliament, predicted CeSID — an independent organization that counts votes in parallel to the official count, the first results from which were expected later Sunday evening.

Vučić’s Socialist allies were on 12.1 percent, in the CeSID count, while the ultranationalist, pro-Russian, Serbian Radical Party of recently acquitted Hague war crimes indictee Vojislav Šešelj had 7.5 percent, and the moderate Democratic Party had 5.5 percent.

“I know where we are going and I know how to get there” — Aleksandar Vučić

A different estimate by Ipsos, however, predicted more smaller parties may cross the 5 percent threshold to enter the 250-seat assembly, including the SDS-LDP-LSV coalition featuring former President Boris Tadić.

Speaking to his supporters in Belgrade as the ballots were still being counted, Vučić said Sunday’s vote produced an “extraordinary result.”

He said the Serbs had voted for a better future, for European integration, and promised the nation to form a government that will work hard fulfill the people’s mandate.

“I know where we are going and I know how to get there,” Vučić said, while also warning, “the path will not be paved with roses and there’s not much milk and honey.”

Vučić called the election — widely seen as a test of the country’s EU membership aspirations — two years early to seek a mandate for reforms necessary for the accession process.

A one-time member of the Serbian Radical Party and information minister under former authoritarian leader Slobodan Milošević, Vučić has steered a pro-EU course during his two terms as prime minister, embracing privatization and deficit reduction, as well as moving to normalize relations with Kosovo, Serbia’s breakaway former province.

Although his one-time mentor Šešelj, acquitted of war crimes last month, looked like regaining a place in parliament his party had lost in 2012, the two appeared to have deep differences over the country’s future direction.

Šešelj told journalists Sunday that he would consider a coalition government with Vučić if the latter abandons his EU course and decides to “integrate with Russia.”

There was no sign of that from Vučić.

“I am almost certain that we will carry on our European integration process and we will have to speed up the process of [EU] accession,” Vučić said Sunday, after voting. “And of course, preserve our traditional ties with our friends in the East,” he said, referring to Russia, Serbia’s historical ally.

Turnout from the country’s 6.7 million eligible voters was around 55 percent when polls closed at 8 p.m.. About 100,000 Serbs living in Kosovo, which declared its independence in 2008, were eligible to vote, and OSCE monitors reported just over 35 percent of them had done so by 6 p.m.

Vučić’s coalition hopes to lead the country into the EU by 2020, although the scale of the challenge facing Serbia as it tries to both regulate its relationship with Kosovo and brings its laws and regulations into conformity with EU demands, has many saying that timeline is unrealistic.

In January, when Vučić called early elections — Serbia’s third parliamentary vote in less than four years — he said the country needed “four more years of stability so that it is ready to join the European Union.”